Nate Woodward's Page

This is a description of our Good Friday Service. For background about the context, concept and process, see Part 1.

Layout
I set up the room differently, as sketched below. The normal setup is on the left, with the band spread across the stage in front. Besides having a communion table, I also set up four stations for the small-group… Continue

Brace yourselves. This will be a two-part recap about our Good Friday Gathering.… Continue

(I began this post on Saturday, but didn't get it finished.)

Most of this past week was a difficult one for me, creatively and spiritually. I had introduced three different activities to my church that I hoped would allow us to walk through the journey of Advent together, but I had doubts about how well those things worked (see Part 1) and… Continue

Today's service was the first part of my attempt to pull something together for my church community to celebrate Advent together. In my last post, I had been pondering two questions:

If advent is about preparation, how do you prepare for a surprise?
If advent is about waiting, how do you wait for the unexpected?

As I thought more about what my own church community is like, I thought that what I really wanted to bring to them was not merely an experience on Sunday, but the experience and practi… Continue

As a kind of experiment, I'm going to try to blog about what I'm putting together for advent. This is going to be a kind of stream-of-consciousness, a documentary, rather than an analysis. At my congregation, for various reasons, we are rather improvisatory (and a bit last-minute), so I just got the go-ahead from my pastor to contribute to something that would help us observe advent.

He intends to focus this December on how the coming of Jesus upsets our expectations of how God comes, that God'… Continue